Once upon a time there was a city where people lived for sixteen hours. Not more, not less. They were born in the morning and began to eat. After breakfast they weighed fifty, a hundred pounds. By the time of brunch, they already had long beards. At noon they were already virgate and a little tired. In the afternoon, they spent their time in the churches, but in vain because they withered even harder, like fruits in the sun. When it was getting darker, day by day, a gust of wind pushed them from behind. They said they were going for a walk, but they never came back.
(Translated by Otilia Mocanu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)Real Fiction is a collective project started in 2013 by Florin Piersic Jr. The concept of Real Fiction continued to exist as a Facebook group, after a volume of stories was published at Humanitas Publishing House. (In March 2021, the group has 4.300 members.) The authors write ultra-short stories, with the texts limited to 500 characters (in Romanian, so the length of the English translation might be a little different) - a flash-fiction exercise on a topic that changes every few days. The group's coordinators are Florin Piersic Jr., Gabriel Molnar, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficţiuni Reale.
